It was Friday evening. The weekend just officially started
as I got back home from office. It gets dark early these days after the
daylight savings time ended in early November. By 6:30 pm, it was pitch black
outside. The doorbell rang and our dog, true to his guard dog instinct, darted
towards the front door, barking loudly. Thinking it must be a package delivery
guy, I peeped outside and saw an African American youth standing outside our
front door--with his hands up.
It took me a few seconds to put the dog in his room and come
back. By that time, the young man was already walking away. I opened the door
and called him back.
“Why did you feel the need to have your hands up?” I was genuinely curious to know. "Were you trying
to gesture that you are unarmed?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Anthony said (I am not disclosing his full name
to preserve his privacy). “I am aware that I am a black man showing up uninvited
within your property after dark. If I were you, I myself would have hesitated
to open the door,” he added. “So thank you for trusting me.”
The poignancy of that moment forced me to write this blog.
This young man with impeccable manners, may be in his upper
teens or early twenties, is trying to make an honest living by selling magazine
subscription, pet accessories and kids toys. As it is, door-to-door selling is
one of the toughest jobs to earn a living from. But imagine having to do that
while fearing for your life, in your own country, because the color of your
skin!
I remember chatting with one of my African American
classmates, when both of us were in law school, about how her mother taught her
brother to always stay out of trouble in order to stay alive! Somehow it did
not make me feel any better that a black mom needed to teach her son things
that even I, an immigrant mother of brown skin, did not need to teach mine.
Coincidentally, this weekend I was catching up on the past
episodes of Patriot Act, the Netflix talk show series by Indian-origin comedian
Hasan Minhaj. In one of his recent episodes titled “The Broken Policing
System,” Minhaj reminded the viewers that it has been more than five years
since the peak of the “Black Lives Matter” protests, but black youths like
Anthony are far from not having to fear for their lives as long as the law
enforcement officers are trained at the very beginning of their career to “warrior policing” techniques rooted deeply in racial distrust.
But one has to keep hope alive. I hope my opening the door to Anthony shows
my son that America is not stuck in the Jim Crow era that he is reading about
in “To Kill a Mockingbird”--his assigned reading for ninth grade. I watched the
movie before, but never read the book. I decided to read the book in parallel
with my son to be able to have a deeper conversation with him. I downloaded the
audiobook and kept listening during my longish drive to and from San Francisco
on Saturday morning to volunteer with the Development School for Youth (DSY), organized by a national non-profit for helping inner-city youths, many of them African Americans, connect with adult professionals who can help
them succeed in life. I got to meet bright youngsters like Destiny, who chose a colorful superhero name--"Red Wings"--for herself during an ice-breaker exercise with the volunteers. I came back home with heart overflowing with hope
to begin the Thanksgiving week in the right spirit.
Some of us are just weekend warriors, but certainly not
the wrong kind of warriors.
